The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  I could see the difference in her the moment we came into her apartment in the palace. She wore a new gown of dark red velvet which suited the warm color of her skin. She did not look like a young woman—she would never be a young woman again; but she had a confident poise which Anne could never learn.

  She welcomed Anne and me with a faint ironic smile. She inquired after my children, she asked after Anne’s health. If she thought for a moment that the country would have been a better place if the sweat had carried off my sister, as it had taken so many others, there was no sign of that in her face.

  In theory, we were still her ladies in waiting, though the presence chamber and the privy chamber which had been allocated to us were almost as large as the queen’s own rooms. Her ladies flitted from her rooms to ours, to the king’s presence chambers. The steady discipline of the court was breaking down, there was a sense now that almost anything could happen. The king and queen were on terms of quiet courtesy. The papal legate was on his way from Rome but taking an inordinate time over the journey. Anne was back at court indeed, but the king had spent a happy summer without her, it might be that his passion had cooled.

  No one dared to predict which way events might move and so there was a steady stream of people arriving to pay their respects to the queen and moving from her rooms to visit Anne. They crossed with another flow whose money was on the other horse. There was even talk that Henry would, in the end, come back to me and our growing nursery. I paid no attention until I heard my uncle had laughed with the king about his handsome boy at Hever.

  I knew well enough, as did Anne, as did George, that my uncle never did anything by accident. Anne took George and me into her privy chamber and stood before us to accuse us.

  “What’s going on?” she demanded.

  I shook my head but George looked shifty.

  “George?”

  “It’s always true that your stars rise and fall in opposition,” he said awkwardly.

  “What d’you mean?” she asked frostily.

  “They had a meeting of the family.”

  “Without me?”

  George flung up his hands like a defeated fencer. “I was summoned. I didn’t speak. I didn’t say a thing.”

  Anne and I were on him at once. “They met without us there? What are they saying? What do they want now?”

  George put us both at arm’s length. “All right! All right! They don’t know which way to jump. They don’t know which way to go. They didn’t want Anne to know for fear of offending her. But now that you are so luckily widowed, Mary, and he lost interest in Anne this summer, they are wondering if he might not be brought round to you again.”

  “He did not lose interest!” Anne swore. “I won’t be supplanted.” She rounded on me. “You she-dog! This would be your plan!”

  I shook my head. “I’ve done nothing.”

  “You came back to court!”

  “You insisted on it. I’ve hardly looked at the king, I’ve hardly said two words to him.”

  She turned from me and pitched face down on the bed as if she could not bear to look at either of us. “But you’ve got his son,” she wailed.

  “That’s it really,” George said gently. “Mary’s got his son and now she’s free to marry. The family think that the king might settle for her. And his dispensation applies to either of you. He can marry her if he wants.”

  Anne rose up from the pillows, tearstained.

  “I don’t want him,” I said, exasperated.

  “It doesn’t matter, does it?” she said bitterly. “If they tell you to go forward then you will go forward and take my chair.”

  “As you took mine,” I reminded her.

  She sat up. “One Boleyn girl or the other.” Her smile was as bitter as if she had been biting on a lemon. “We might either of us be Queen of England and yet we’ll always be nothing to our family.”

  Anne spent the next weeks entrancing the king all over again. She drew him away from the queen, away even from his daughter. Slowly the court came to realize that she had won him back. There was nobody but Anne.

  I watched the seduction with the detachment of a widow. Henry gave Anne a London house of her own. Durham House on The Strand, her own apartments over the tiltyard at Greenwich Palace for the Christmas season. The king’s council publicly ruled that the queen should not dress too finely nor go out to be seen by the people. It was apparent to everyone that it was only a matter of time before Cardinal Campeggio ruled for divorce, Henry could marry Anne, and I could go home to my children and make a new life.

  I was still Anne’s chief confidante and companion and one day in November she insisted that she and George and I walk by the flooded river at Greenwich Palace.

  “You must be wondering what will become of you, now that you have no husband,” Anne started. She seated herself on a bench and looked up at me.

  “I thought I would live with you while you need me, and then go back to Hever,” I said cautiously.

  “I can ask the king to allow that,” she said. “It is in my gift.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And I can ask him to provide for you,” she said. “William left you almost nothing, you know.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “The king used to pay William a pension of one hundred pounds a year. I can have that pension transferred to you.”

  “Thank you,” I repeated.

  “The thing is,” Anne said lightly, turning her collar up against the cold wind, “I thought I would adopt Henry.”

  “You thought what?”

  “I thought I would adopt little Henry as my own son.”

  I was so astounded, I could only look at her. “You don’t even like him very much,” I said, the first foolish thought of a loving mother. “You never even play with him. George has spent more time with him than you.”

  Anne glanced away, as if seeking patience from the river and the jumbled rooftops of the City beyond. “No. Of course. That’s not why I would adopt him. I don’t want him because I like him.”

  Slowly, I started to think. “So that you have a son, Henry’s son. You have a son who is a Tudor by birth. If he marries you then in the same ceremony he gets a son.”

  She nodded.

  I turned and took a couple of steps, my riding boots crunching on the frozen gravel. I was thinking furiously. “And of course, this way, you take my son away from me. So I am less desirable to Henry. In one move you make yourself the mother of the king’s son and you take away my great claim to his attention.”

  George cleared his throat, and leaned against the river wall, arms folded across his chest, his face a picture of detachment. I rounded on him. “You knew?”

  He shrugged. “She told me after she’d done it. She did it as soon as we told her that the family thought that you might take the eye of the king again. She only told Father and Uncle after the king had agreed and the deed was done. Uncle thought it a keen bit of play.”

  I found my throat dry and I swallowed. “A keen bit of play?”

  “And it means that you are provided for,” George said fairly. “It puts your son close to the throne, it concentrates all the benefits on Anne, it’s a good plan.”

  “This is my son!” I could hardly say the words, I was choking on my grief. “He is not for sale like some Christmas goose driven into market.”

  George rose from the wall and put his arm around my shoulders, turned me to face him. “No one’s selling him, we’re making him all but a prince,” he said. “We’re claiming his rights for him. He could be the next King of England. You should be proud.”

  I closed my eyes and felt the onshore wind on the cold skin of my face. I thought for a moment that I might faint or vomit, and more than anything else I longed for that, to be struck down so sick that they had to take me home to Hever and leave me there forever with my children.

  “And Catherine? What about my daughter?”

  “You can keep Catherine,” Anne said precisely
. “She’s only a girl.”

  “If I refuse?” I looked up into George’s dark honest eyes. I trusted George, even though he had kept this from me.

  He shook his head. “You can’t refuse. She’s done it legally. Signed and sealed already. It’s done.”

  “George,” I whispered. “This is my boy, my little boy. You know what my boy is to me.”

  “You’ll still see him,” George said consolingly. “You’d be his aunt.”

  It was like a physical blow. I staggered, and would have lost my footing but for George’s arm. I turned to Anne who was sweetly silent, the smuggest of small smiles curving her lips. “It’s everything for you, isn’t it?” I said, shaken by the depth of my hatred. “You have to have everything, don’t you? You have the King of England at your beck and call and you have to have my son too. You’re like a cuckoo that eats all the other babes in the nest. How far do we all have to go for your ambition? You’ll be the death of us all, Anne.”

  She turned her head away from the hatred on my face. “I have to be queen,” was all she said. “And you all have to help me. Your son Henry can play his part in the advancement of this family and we will help him upward, in return. You know that’s how it is, Mary. Only a fool rails against the way the dice fall.”

  “They’re weighted dice when I play with you,” I said. “I shan’t forget this, Anne. On your deathbed I’ll remind you that you took my son because you were afraid that you could not make one of your own.”

  “I can make a son!” she said, stung. “You did it! Why shouldn’t I?”

  I gave a little triumphant laugh. “Because you’re older every day,” I said spitefully. “And so is the king. Who knows that you can make a child at all? I was so fertile with him that I had two children from him one after another, and one the most beautiful boy that God ever put on this earth. You’ll never have a boy like my Henry, Anne. You know in your very bones that you’ll never have a boy to match him. All you can do is steal my son because you know you’ll never have your own.”

  She was so white that she looked as if the sweat had come back to her.

  “Stop it,” George said. “Stop it, you two.”

  “Never say that again,” she hissed at me. “It’s to curse me. And if I fall, then you go down too, Mary. And George, and all of us. Never dare to say that again or I’ll have you sent to a nunnery and you’ll never see either of your children again.”

  She leaped up from her seat and swirled away in a ripple of fur-trimmed brocade. I watched her run up the path to the palace and thought what a dangerous enemy she was. She could run to Uncle Howard, she could run to the king. Anne had the ear of everyone who might command me. And if she wanted my son, if she wanted my life, she had only to tell either of them and it would be done.

  George put his hand on mine. “I’m sorry,” he said awkwardly. “But at least this way your children stay at Hever and you can see them.”

  “She takes everything,” I said. “She has always taken everything. But I will never forgive her this.”

  Spring 1529

  ANNE AND I WERE IN THE HALL OF BLACKFRIARS MONASTERY, hidden by a curtain at the back. We could not stay away. Nobody who had the smallest pretext to be in court could bear to stay away. Nothing like it had ever happened in England before. It was the place they had chosen to hear the evidence for and against the marriage of the King and Queen of England, a most extraordinary hearing, a most extraordinary event.

  The court was at Bridewell Palace—just next door to the monastery. The king and queen would sit down to dinner in the great hall of Bridewell every night, and every day they would go to the court at Blackfriars and hear if their marriage had ever been valid, in all its long loving twenty years’ duration.

  It was a dreadful day. The queen was dressed in one of her finest gowns, she had clearly decided to defy the council’s command that she dress very plain. She was in her new red velvet gown with a petticoat of golden brocade. Her sleeves and the hem of the gown were trimmed with the rich black fur of sable. Her dark red hood framed her face and she did not look weary and sad, as she had done for the past two years; she looked fiery and animated, ready for battle.

  When the king was asked to speak to the court he said that he had had doubts about the validity of the marriage from the very beginning and the queen interrupted him—as no one else in the world would dare to do—and said, very reasonably, that he had left his doubts silent for a long time. The king raised his voice and continued to the end of his prepared speech, but he was rattled.

  He said that he had overruled his own doubts because of the great love he felt for the queen, but he could not ignore his anxieties any more. I felt Anne beside me tremble like a horse held in from the hunt. “Such nonsense!” she whispered passionately.

  They called the queen to reply to the king’s statement. The court crier called her name: once, twice, three times; but she ignored him completely though he stood beside her throne and shouted. She walked through the court, her head very high, and she went straight to Henry, seated on his throne. She kneeled before him. Anne craned around the curtain: “What’s she doing?” she demanded. “She can’t do that.”

  I could hear the queen though we were right at the back of the court. Every word was perfectly clear though her accent was as strong as ever.

  “Alas, sir,” she said gently, almost intimately. “Where have I offended you? I take God and all the world to witness that I have been to you a true, humble and obedient wife. These twenty years and more I have been your true wife, and by me you have had many children though it pleased God to call them out of this world. And when you had me at the first I was a true maid, without touch of man—”

  Henry shifted in his seat and looked to the head of the court, imploring them to interrupt her, but she never took her eyes from his face.

  “If that is true or not I put to your conscience.”

  “She can’t do this!” Anne hissed disbelievingly. “She has to call her lawyers to give evidence. She can’t speak to the king in public.”

  “She is, though,” I said.

  There was complete silence in the hall, everyone was listening to the queen. Henry, pressed against the back of his throne, was pale with embarrassment. He looked like a fat spoiled child confronted by an angel. I found that I was smiling at the sight of her, I found I was grinning, though it was my family whose cause was sinking with every word she spoke. I was near to delighted laughter because Katherine of Aragon was speaking out for the women of the country, for the good wives who should not be put aside just because their husbands had taken a fancy to another, for the women who walked the hard road between kitchen, bedroom, church and childbirth. For the women who deserved more than their husband’s whim.

  Katherine referred her cause to God and the law, and there was uproar when she finished speaking. The cardinals hammered for order, the clerks shouted, and the excitement spread to the people outside the hall and in the streets outside the barred gates of the monastery who repeated her words one to another and then shouted in a great clamor of support for Katherine, the true Queen of England.

  And Anne, at my side, burst into tears, laughing and crying at the same time. “She will be my death or I will be hers!” she swore. “I will see her dead, please God, before she is the end of me.”

  Summer 1529

  IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN ANNE’S SUMMER OF TRIUMPH. CARDINAL Campeggio’s court to hear the matter of the marriage was finally in session, its decision a certainty however persuasive the queen might be. Cardinal Wolsey was Anne’s declared friend and chief supporter, the King of England was as much in love as ever, and the queen, after her one triumphant moment, had stepped back, even failing to appear in the court again.

  But there was no joy for Anne. When she heard that I was packing to go to Hever to spend the summer with my children she came into the room as if all the fiends in hell were biting at her heels.

  “You can’t leave me while the cardinals’ co
urt is still sitting, I have to have you beside me.”

  “Anne, I do nothing. I don’t understand half of it and the rest of it I don’t want to hear. All this stuff about what Prince Arthur said the morning after their wedding night, and all this servants’ gossip from a lifetime ago. I don’t want to hear it, it makes no sense to me.”

  “You think I want to hear it?” she demanded.

  I should have been warned by the wildness in her voice. “You must do, for you’re always in court,” I said reasonably. “But they’ll be finished soon, won’t they? They’ll say that the queen was married to Prince Arthur, the marriage consummated, and the marriage between her and Henry invalid. Then it’s done. What d’you need me here for?”

  “Because I’m afraid!” she suddenly burst out. “I’m afraid! I’m afraid all the time. You can’t leave me here alone, Mary. I need you here.”

  “Now, Anne,” I said persuasively. “What is there to fear? The court is not hearing the truth nor looking for it. It is under the command of Wolsey who is the king’s man through and through. It is under the command of Campeggio, who has orders from the Pope to see this business to the finish. Your path is straight before you. If you don’t want to be here at Bridewell Palace, then go to your new house in London. If you don’t want to sleep alone then you have six ladies in waiting. If you are fearful of the king and some new girl at court, then order him to send her away. He does everything that you want. Everyone does everything that you want.”

  “You don’t!” Her voice was sharp and resentful.

  “I don’t have to, I’m only the other Boleyn girl. No money, no husband, no future unless you say so. No children unless I am allowed to see them. No son…” My voice quavered for a moment. “But I am allowed to go to see them, and I am going to go, Anne. You can’t stop me. No power in the world can stop me.”

  “The king can stop you,” she warned me.

  I turned to face her and my voice was like iron. “Hear this, Anne. If you tell him to ban me from my children, I will hang myself with your gold girdle in your new palace of Durham House and you will be accursed forever. There are some things which are too great for even you to play with. You cannot stop me seeing my children this summer.”